Overheard by Conifers

Don Precosky teaches English at the College of New Caledonia and is the
co-editor of Four Realities: Poets of Northern B.C.

John Hicks writes in the tradition of the early modernists, whose
imagist ideas about poetry have especially influenced his work. He
paints his pictures with a haiku-like delicacy: “The quarter-hour /
chimes softly / the grass has grown // the clock knows / no work is
finished / the blade rises // the hand follows / the brush dries / soon
soon” (“The Road to Candle Lake”). Unfortunately, in too many
places the book is but a faint echo of its modernist predecessors, the
idiom trapped in another time, as in these lines: “Let shadows show
you the onward / thrust, scrunch of small stones / be your directionals.
No one / treads else this course, / or will” (“The Way of the
Moon”).